Abstract

The minimum rectilinear Steiner tree (MRST) problem arises in global routing and wiring estimation, as well as in many other areas. The MRST problem is known to be NPhard, and the best performing MRST heuristic to date is the Iterated 1-Steiner (I1S) method recently proposed by Kahng and Robins [13]. I1S achieves significantly improved averagecase performance while avoiding the worst-case examples from which other approaches suffer, yet the algorithm has heretofore lacked a practical implementation. In this paper we develop a straightforward, efficient implementation of I1S, achieving speedup factors of over 200 compared to previous implementations. We also propose a parallel implementation of I1S that achieves near-linear speedup on K processors. Extensive empirical testing confirms the viability of our approaches, which allow for the first time the benchmarking of I1S on nets containing several hundred pins.

Citations